We have a thirst for knowledge. Only ostriches stick their heads in the sand. Right? So how can we explain the following?
“Don't tell me how the movie ends.”
“Please don't tell me if I have the gene for the disease.”
“Please don't tell me my startup is likely to fail.”
“Please don't tell me if my spouse cheated on me.”
“Please don't tell me how to slaughter a calf.”
Often we prefer not to know things, contrary to simple economic theory that more information is always better. We tell each other that ignorance is bliss. We reject the idea of too much information.
We structure our society to exclude knowledge for certain purposes. There is inadmissible evidence in a court of law. There are inadmissible questions for employers to ask of applicants. For 17 years, the military's policy on homosexuality was “don't ask, don't tell.” In recent years, many colleges have stopped requiring SAT and ACT scores, but some have started requiring them again.
This week I read a book on the subject, “Willful Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know.” Published in paperback in 2021, the book is a collection of academic papers edited by Ralf Hertwig and Christoph Engel. Engel is an expert in law and economics at the Max Planck Institute for Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, and Hertwig, a psychologist, is an expert in adaptive rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
“Willful ignorance is an underrated psychological tool,” the editors write in their preface. They write, with a hint of irony, that psychology “has made a mistake by choosing to remain largely ignorant on the subject of willful ignorance.”
Willful ignorance can be useful, like clearing up confusion in your head, or harmless, like not wanting to spoil a movie — orchestras started hiring more women after musicians hid behind screens during auditions to hide their gender. But willful ignorance can also have negative consequences, like when someone with HIV chooses not to get tested and thus spreads the virus to others.
I thought about willful ignorance when I read a recent Harris Poll for the Guardian which found that last month, 49 percent of Americans believed the S&P 500 stock index had fallen this year (it was up 9 percent since the beginning of the year) and the same percent believed the unemployment rate was at a 50-year high, even though the actual unemployment rate was not far above its 50-year low.
This can't be dismissed as simply false. Believing something so far from the truth is evidence that many Americans have created their own reality and pushed aside facts that don't fit it. For some, it may be a psychological defense mechanism: “I'm not happy, but we're all in the same boat.”
But rejecting obvious reality can also be used as an avenue of attack, as we saw in 2021 when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the election. Trump's repeated claims that traditional sources of information cannot be trusted have made the situation worse. “Remember, what you're seeing, what you're reading, is not what's actually happening,” Trump once said.
In a game of chicken between negotiating parties, the player who doesn't know how bad things will turn out will always win against the player who is perfectly aware. Ignorance is a lot like courage. “Ignorance is strength” was one of Big Brother's slogans in the dystopian novel “1984.”
In an interview, Hartwig said that picking just one news source and skimming over others is in itself an act of willful ignorance. “We've entered a new world where our natural tendencies interact with the information environment and amplify their effects,” Hartwig said.
“Willful Ignorance” is not primarily a book about politics. Many of the most interesting examples come from other fields. In personal finance, to avoid overtrading, investors are wise to turn a blind eye to the day-to-day ups and downs of their portfolio's performance.
In business, one chapter argues that companies compartmentalize information — keeping employees intentionally ignorant — to reduce the risk of holding the entire company liable for individual wrongdoing. Or during a strike, union leaders, unaware of workers' wishes, might skip meetings with the rank-and-file, sending a message to management that they are unmoved.
Another business example: A company pledges to never inquire about why a supplier underperformed. “In this case, ignorance ensures the company's commitment not to accept excuses, even if they are legitimate.” Knowing this, the supplier is motivated to put in more effort. “Such an arm's-length relationship can be beneficial, because it creates better incentives and improves overall productivity,” the chapter authors write.
In the interview, Hartwig spoke of artificial intelligence being “hungry for data,” in computer terms. If you tell it to ignore race, it will fall back on a good proxy for race: zip code. There's no easy way to make an AI ignorant, Hartwig said. But one way is to use “fast and frugal” algorithms that don't take advantage of obviously forbidden information, rather than “black box” algorithms that can't explain how they work.
“We believe that the study of willful ignorance has the potential to become a very important new scientific career,” Hartwig and Engel write. I hope they're right; if they're wrong, I don't want to know.
Reader comments
There will always be famine somewhere, and humanitarian crises so dire they will soak up every penny I can send. Do I think of giving to museums as a luxury, like dining out, rather than an amount set aside for charity? If everyone followed effective altruism, would museums even exist?
Dena Davis
Manhattan
Effective altruism means the virtue of defining the good as carefully as possible, tolerating mistakes, changing your mind, and following where serious debate leads. A quick look at GiveWell's philanthropy report shows how EAs are insecure even when they express their strongest support. Critics of your article seem mostly interested in scoring cheap points, from the ridiculous (an extraordinary report of improper fishing is more important than saving a child's life) to the unfalsifiable. They say EAs are neocolonial, yet giving directly to the world's poorest people is the first choice for many EAs. It's also the benchmark against which other interventions are evaluated.
Matt Reardon
London
The author is a manager at 80,000 Hours, an Effective Altruism organization.
The impact of housing costs on happiness probably needs its own separate metric, especially since it is a “dual-use” cost – that is, for some it is a purely speculative expense, and for others it is as essential as food, but unfortunately unaffordable.
Let’s let the experts work it all out and make the results a component of a revised Misery Index to better inform policymakers about how their choices affect consumers.
William Wescott
Tbilisi, Georgia
Quote of the Day
“In general, noise makes it very difficult to test practical and academic theories about how financial and economic markets work. We are forced to operate largely in the dark.”
— Fischer Black, “Noise” (1986)
